peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
The Chinese garden; combining restrained formality
with intimacy. Paths that wind slowly like an old clock; the double helix of
human design and nature intertwined. Like the dragons and clouds motif along
the temple steps. Or willows falling into water; the green border of an
artificial lake. The shaded path parts; wooden steps lead upwards. The steps
that wind up the temple hill... the path that leads through the sacred grove...
transfigured by the magical presence of spring blossoms, almost a religion in themselves,
like a seasonal shrine, a site of contemplation. What could be further from the
gates of the palace, the corridors of power?
Sighing in the branches of the willows; fallen like
the red leaves of autumn; the eternal reminder of loss and misfortune. The
spirit of tragedy is the ghost of power.
The omnipresence of the temple,
shrine, or similar forms in the Chinese park or garden mean that any act of
contemplation, be it of the wind on the waters of an ornamental lake, spring
blossom floating in the air around a wooden pavilion, or the colour of autumn
leaves in a stone courtyard, finds that its sacred lining may not only lead to
the pursuance of pious thought, to contemplation in the abstract, but may also
lead to the contemplation of religion at large to its place and role in
society. And so the contemplation of temporal power. Such is the proximity of
religion and politics. What path is then chosen is due to the power of
contemplation.
Clustered on the swerve of the temple roof;
regimented, watching; immortals and dragons. Palace and temple share the same
pointed roof, the same ornamentation, the same solar symbolism. The
contemplation of power...
All forms of power have long been centralised as
Religion and the State have, in effect, fused at their upper reaches (an often
uneasy amalgam of Court, aristocracy, State bureaucracy, and religious
hierarchies). Although not constituting State religion as such (this role was
played by the ritual aspect of Confucianism, the religion of the State bureaucracy)
Buddhism and Daoism have both benefited from State patronage. Thus, while the
favourite religion of the ruling elites may have changed (with a concomitant
persecution of different religions at different times), State-sponsored
religions have been the defacto
norm throughout Chinese history - with others either not permitted or barely
tolerated. This situation remains true of
The traditions of religion (and behind them, their
long history of alliance with the State) are, in this way, never far from the
aesthetics of the
The power of contemplation... the slow, silent seepage of the ideal; water
in limestone caverns; refusing to be bound to the limitations of the present
(or to those of the past). The contemplated ideal is the spring of the future.
The bench by the lake, the view over the waters to the
temple. The ascending path, the sheltered grove. The garden as a site of quiet
reflection, a site of questioning. The converse and individual appropriation of
the Chinese garden as an implicit site of state recognition, a site of state
religion, with contemplation reduced to one more ritual of belonging. An
appropriation of the mythical, the metaphysical, which, by a slight shift in
emphasis, allows the production the ethical and political. As if calling upon a
yet higher power for the answer to the perennial question; how to order ones
life (in times such as these)? Questions asked silently in a Chinese garden.
Contemplation
as a ritual of resistance... the quietest thoughts are the most heretical.
Contemplation as the site of an on-going negotiation,
a testing-out of the threads stretching between individual and State. Side by
side with (or by means of) the debate between the, not too distant, realms of
Reflection on the limits of the possible. The
reflection of the temple or the undulation of the tree line in the still waters
of the temple pool; an inverted horizon, the mirror landscape of the vertical,
the reflection of an ideal. An imaginary horizon; a preferred state of life.
Making the best of 'interesting times'. No utopia (the
disasters of the last one are still contributing to the crisis of the present).
Only the afterlife, with freedom from a return: a return to Heaven, to Nirvana.
Otherwise love's work of amelioration; and a prayer of hope for one's family
and friends.
In the contemplation of ruins, Western criticism,
Western poets (and in the contemplation of ruins we are all poets) find the
death of self, of time, even the death of a culture, a civilisation. Yet in the
Chinese park or garden there is to be found a very different form of
contemplation. If the classic Western appropriation of ruins features the loss
of self, the loss of the ego, it nevertheless (almost in a clandestine way)
works in favour of some sort of system of belief (usually the default religious
system in operation in that culture at that time – or perhaps just that of the
particular viewer at that time). Together with its correlate: some kind of new
self. Chastised and humbled by that which is before it. Or only apparently so
(the ascetic fallacy): rather, buttressed by religion, the self looks down on
the vanity of the past and exalts its own saved, and so superior status. A
status reinforced by the brute fact of its own existence, by its mere presence
as a viewer. In the contemplation of the garden landscape the Chinese find
meditation; a lyric compared to the West's commemorative dirge when faced with
a landscape, park, or garden with a ruin or folly (it is not a question of the
response to ruins as such, rather the choice of culture to prefer ruins or
temples and the similarity of the conservatism of their final function and
meaning). Perhaps the Chinese experience of the garden even includes a moment
of insight, as compared to the western desire for elegy, poetic analogue of
mourning? Do we have an expression and remoulding of the internal that is more
open (less morbid) in its refreshment of the self? Or are only the modalities,
the mood and the cultural specificity different (the sacrificial nature of
Christianity, its status as a religion of mourning, and as inheritor of the
ruins of the classical paganism and its empire as prime contributor to its
aesthetic genesis)? Does not the function remain the same; finally is it not
the greater belief (whatever it might be) that is supported on the pillars of
the temples, held up on the trunks of these trees? The sculpture of landscape and the view over
the carefully-placed temple-like forms within it, like the sculptures that
adorn palaces and places of worship the world over, represents, albeit in the
gentlest of ways, the insistence of a world view, a view offered of order and
of last things.
Water flows under a half-moon bridge; the apocalypse
in the sky -reflected in waters below- shivers apart. A shoal of fish pass
beneath, barely visible, vague darting forms leaving only a trail of ripples on
the surface. Only sign of their passing.
Behind the reflection of the heavens. The ritual
identifications of the appearance of contemplation: from the joy and ecstasy of
the contemplation of spring blossom, of the cycle of rebirth as personal
rebirth to the personal reflection on times, on one's identity as separate or
separable from the realm of official discourse; the residue that escapes all
regulation, even self-regulation. The contemplation of beauty as renewal. A
rising tide which cleanses not only the ego, but suggests the cleansing of
life, the purifying waters of which may well extend to the realm of the Temple and
even to the State itself. Sitting alone, or surrounded by many others, within
sight of reflective waters, green shoots or newly born flowers, witnessing the
return of the blood-red cherry blossoms out of the silent black and grey of
winter bark, who knows what thoughts pass through the mind of the still and
silent contemplative as spring returns to the Chinese garden.
Pink and red; opening buds. Blushing, a river of white
pearls runs down a branch. Blood wells up from the corpse of the old trunk.
Copyright 2005 Peter Nesteruk